Ming explains why child-led play therapy sounds simple but rarely works in practice. When kids are rigid or reactive, strict nonintervention clashes with safety rules. Senior therapists can embed teaching moments naturally; junior therapists usually lack the time and skill.
So let's say that your child is already having some rigidity. If you take away something, he will cry. Right. When he does something this or that, he will be unhappy. Right? To follow the child's lead, meaning you cannot touch anything at all. That's just impossible because there are some rules that you cannot cross with a kid, and you're trying to follow their lead. All you're going to do is sit there and watch them do their thing. And that's not really therapy. Any therapists, in fact, junior therapists, don't know how to do it because it takes so much time, it takes so much skill to embed the skills you want to teach inside of a naturalistic setting. Therefore, there's a lot more research going on to it and a lot more senior therapists are willing to put in the time to do these things that can create very good results.
